The present invention relates to teaching machines.
The rising costs of education, resulting in the raising of taxes in many localities, has given new and added impetus to the search for methods of teaching pupils which do not directly utilize the teacher's time. The increased emphasis on educational proficiency, particularly for the economically disadvantaged, has also given rise to the need for better methods in which information may be imparted to individuals. The need for such improved methods is particularly strong in regard to cognitive or rote learning, that is, the learning of material which can only be learned by repetition. Teachers resent spending their time in endless drill of such information, particulary since their skills in teaching concepts, inspiring and handling pupils are not being utilized. Teacher conducted drills are deficient because they do not allow for any difference between the learning rates of different pupils or for the background or proficiency of such pupils. Consequently, during such drill periods many students are bored while others are not able to keep up with the class.
A great waste of the teacher's time is occasioned by the disparity in the learning of various pupils, that is, facts which one pupil knows are unknown to another, and vice versa. Thus, the patterns of missing facts in the memories of the various students in a group are always completely different, so the teacher must, in effect, act as a private tutor to each student and ends up teaching almost all the factual background required, even though it may be considered as a prerequisite for the class being taught. This "Information Hole Filling" process which all teachers engage in has been estimated as taking up as much as 80% of the teacher's time spent with the individual students. This poses a particularly serious problem in certain situations, for example, for the minority student arriving at a university where this background of "holes" in his knowledge is particularly difficult to rectify because of the costs of the individual instruction required.
A major difficulty in implementing individualized instruction is that there must also be a testing procedure which is also individualized. The time required for such a testing procedure generally makes it impracticable, and thus instruction may only be individualized within the limited range encompassed by the testing procedure, which generally requires that all learners be tested at once on a given type of material.
In the sale of many types of goods where many competing possibilities exist, such as in the purchase of a house or a particular brand of liquor, or a particular type of instrument, the purchase must be based on comparison of a large number of comparable items where eventually the choise depends on a comparative value judgment. A machine capable of displaying items on a comparative list and eliminating items from that list as the purchaser rejects them can aid in the decision process. Such an instrument might be referred to as a "selling display machine".